Le Guin is funny, she’s angry, and her anger makes her beautifully provocative. She wants us to be more focused on community and less on heroic individualism. She thinks we’d be culturally richer if we included more diverse perspectives in the stories we tell each other.

When I read that “[t]he story of the carrier bag is a story of containment” I thought about those first womanly crafts, of how those first containers were made, and about how they were developed over the ages into textiles and clothing and eventually into quilts. I’d come full circle by building my quilts into vessels and now I needed to tie the patterns and craft of quiltmaking into a another kind of container to tell another kind of story.

Designing Carrier Bag Theory helped me solve a creative problem I’ve been mulling over for ages. I love traditional quilting, but was experimenting with ways to soften the hard graphics that are created by the seams between the different fabrics used to make traditional blocks. I wanted wavier lines and colors that blended more like paint than textiles. Many quilt artists create this effect by literally painting their textiles instead of cutting up different fabrics and piecing them together. I often do that myself. But I realized that my technique of flipping quilt tops over so that the seams are visible would let me create soft shapes while using traditional quilt block patterns if I dyed my fabric carefully.

The front piece of Carrier Bag Theory is made of two traditional quilting blocks that are associated with women’s labor. First is the Churn Dash, a block made of rectangles and half-square triangles. The block’s shape refers to the top of a butter churn. The second block is a deconstructed version of Hens and Chicks. It refers to animal keeping and childbearing. By blurring the blocks, so their edges aren’t clear, I wanted these references to women’s work to be latent instead of front and center. You have look to see them, and you need to know what to look for.

The back piece is solid fabric, but it’s a separate piece cut at specific angles that helps the container hold a shape like a spout. Le Guin’s carrier bag is a receptacle, but I added the reference to the pouring out, or sharing, of our communal knowledge and resources.

I wanted to quantify women’s work in the number of circles I drew with the quilting. Each row of quilting has about thirty circles in it and there about 80 rows of circles on the front piece and about 85 rows on the back piece. The circles are different sizes, but they have an average of about 30 stitches per circle. So to make this quilt, I drew nearly 5000 circles and made almost 140,00 machine stitches to complete the quilting part of the process.

I think you’ll enjoy reading Le Guin’s essay. Even if you don’t love it, you’ll find something interesting and thoughtful to say about it. The full text of the essay is all over the internet, and yours for the googling, but the link I provided above is from an artist’s collective website, so you might slide down a fun rabbit hole if you click the link. Please email me your thoughts after you’ve read it. I’d love to have that conversation with you.